Congress Passes Bills Extending CHIP Funding

On Oct. 4, the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Finance Committee passed bills to extend for five years the federal funding for Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which expired on Oct. 1. The bills also propose rolling back the federal enhanced match rate for CHIP by 2021. The House bill would allocate $1 billion in additional Medicaid funding for Puerto Rico and $30 million for the U.S. Virgin Islands for damage caused by hurricanes. The House bill also restores $2 billion in federal disproportionate share hospital (DSH) funding for 2018, but adds $8 billion in DSH cuts for 2026 and an additional $8 billion in cuts for 2027. No details were given for how the Senate would fund the CHIP reauthorization, but the House bill proposes several offsets, including premium increases for higher-income Medicare recipients, changes to Medicaid rules that would make it easier for states to collect money from third-party insurers and a provision that would restrict lottery winners from receiving Medicaid for periods of time based on the size of their winnings. Ten states said that without CHIP reauthorization, they would run out of federal funds by the end of 2017, and 28 states said they will use up their money by April 2018.